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Profile: electronics

Bench electronics, instruments and device programmers

Stage: 1.0

Who it is for

Someone who builds or repairs equipment: flashes microcontrollers and firmware, probes boards, or measures with a NanoVNA, tinySA, LibreVNA or ADALM2000.

At a glance
Stage 1.0
Units 14
Disk about 250 MB; LibreVNA's build adds about 780 MB of Qt development packages
Hardware The programmers and instruments themselves. Nothing here needs any of them to install.
Consent none
Install hammunition install electronics

What it installs

Six device programmers covering AVR, SPI flash, ARM debug probes, FPGAs, ST-LINK and the STM32 serial bootloader; command-line control of the ADALM2000 lab instrument, and libiio's tools, which find and talk to it and to a PlutoSDR; desktop front ends for the two instruments most likely to be on a ham's bench, the tinySA spectrum analyser and the NanoVNA, and the program for the open-hardware LibreVNA, built from source; and three calculators — a Smith chart, a coil designer and an arbitrary transmission-line solver.

Disk footprint: Around 250 MB, before LibreVNA: its source build adds Qt 6's development packages (218 packages and about 780 MB on a bare Debian 13 image, measured 2026-10-01) and took 14 minutes at the lowest priority. The Qt front ends for the tinySA and NanoVNA are most of the rest; the programmers themselves are small.

Why these belong together

This is the half of the hobby that happens at a bench rather than at an operating position. It is deliberately opt-in: a station that only operates needs none of it, and a person building or repairing equipment wants all of it. The instrument front ends are here rather than in antenna because you reach for them for anything you have built, not only for antennas.

Packages (14)

avrdude, flashrom, openocd, openfpgaloader, stlink-tools, stm32flash, m2kcli, libiio-utils, qttinysa, nanovna-saver, librevna, gsmc, coil64, atlc

What it deliberately excludes

The EDA cluster — KiCad, Fritzing, ngspice, gspiceui. Those are reserved to the maintainer in docs/PARITY-POLICY.md and are not a decision this profile makes. Also excludes the programmer hardware class's udev rules, which are hardware catalog entries rather than packages and are applied by device detection rather than by installing a profile.

Install it

Read the plan first. It changes nothing and prints every package, build, file and system change, and every consent gate you will meet:

hammunition show electronics
hammunition install electronics --dry-run

Then do it. The engine asks for your sudo password once, near the start, and shows the same plan again before it asks you to confirm:

hammunition install electronics

A member your machine cannot take is deferred by name and the rest installs (D-039); the plan lists each under Will NOT happen, with the reason and the command that fixes it. Installation explains how to read every part of the plan.

What you configure by hand afterward

Programmers and instruments need device permissions and this profile does not grant them. Most need membership of plugdev or dialout and a udev rule; the hardware catalog carries the rules and hammunition hardware apply writes them and adds you to the groups. A device that works under sudo and not otherwise is a permissions problem, not a broken cable. Know your tinySA's input power limit before connecting it to anything transmitting — it is the instrument most often destroyed on its first day. LibreVNA-GUI starts a SCPI server on TCP port 19542 on every network address, with no password, by its own default; turn it off in its Preferences unless another program drives it.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Read the plan: hammunition install electronics --dry-run. LibreVNA is a source build of about 14 minutes with a large set of Qt 6 development packages.
  2. Install: hammunition install electronics.
  3. Apply device permissions: hammunition hardware apply, then log out and back in. A programmer that works under sudo and not otherwise is a permissions problem.
  4. Plug a tinySA or NanoVNA in and open its front end (qttinysa or nanovna-saver). Know the instrument's input power limit before you connect it to anything transmitting.
  5. If you installed librevna, open its Preferences and turn off the SCPI server on TCP port 19542 unless another program drives it; it listens on every address with no password.
  6. For an AVR, run avrdude -c <programmer> -p <part> -v first to read the chip's signature before you write anything.

Take it off again

hammunition uninstall electronics --dry-run
hammunition uninstall electronics

This removes what Hammunition itself installed and nothing else. It does not remove dependencies apt pulled in, group memberships or configuration files it wrote; the plan says so and the transaction log records them (D-004).